Except, is there really that much news to write up? By most accounts Second Life has only a few tens of thousand simultaneous users.

So, surely it would make more sense to have an Orc embedded behind enemy lines in World of Warcraft, which has millions of users? And there would be certainly be no shortage of war stories to file.

Then again, I suppose Second Life has more potential for generating interesting ideas. Just take NOAA's extreme weather simulations, or the simulated ecosystems that some artificial life researchers are trying to build. What other scientific experiments do you think might lend themselves to Second Life?